AI’s money bots are here and everyone wants to handle their cash

For years, the stablecoin industry has been waiting for its killer app — the use case that would prove digital dollars are more than a tool for crypto speculators, by powering everyday commerce at global scale.

When the idea took hold that AI agents would need fast, cheap, programmable money to transact at machine speed, it looked like the moment had finally come. The thesis captivated markets — a single Citrini Research scenario imagining agents bypassing card fees wiped billions off Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., and American Express Co. in a day.

But the companies actually building payment systems for AI agents are finding that the answer is more complicated.

Credit cards offer chargebacks, fraud protection, and dispute resolution — a trust infrastructure that hundreds of millions of users depend on and that stablecoin payments cannot yet replicate. Most Americans carry a card and earn rewards for using it. Relatively few have ever held a stablecoin. Crypto will account for just 1% to 5% of retail gross merchandise value in online and offline retail by 2030, according to Crone Consulting LLC. Traditional rails will handle the rest.

“It’s overhyped,” said Christian Catalini, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who helped create Meta-initiated Libra stablecoin project, later renamed Diem. “If you think about agentic commerce, the most likely scenario is, the incumbents are going to dominate it.”

Card networks are positioning themselves to own the shift. Visa Intelligent Commerce for AI agents is already in trials, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay is live for U.S. cardholders.

“Most people don’t have a stablecoin wallet,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth. “It’s incredibly important that we separate the very well deserved attention that stablecoins get in the agentic world, and the reality.”

Many start-ups building this future are arriving at a similar conclusion. Several companies that launched with stablecoin-only agent payments are now adding card networks and bank integrations. X402, an open standard for agent payments incubated by crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc. is in discussions to add traditional payment methods this year. Skyfire, which built a platform for AI agents to transact, has just added Visa and is about to integrate Mastercard, and is in talks with banks.

“On the consumer side, at least for the foreseeable future, credit cards will continue to be a big factor,” said Amir Sarhangi, CEO of Skyfire. “We are so accustomed to our points, to all the benefits like purchasing protection.” He believes stablecoins will find more traction among corporate customers.

Even among corporate users, cards may hold their ground. Sean Neville, who co-founded the company behind the USDC stablecoin and now runs Catena Labs, said he expects AI software to end up holding its own one-time use cards with spending limits. Catena is testing with banks a system designed to help such software move money, lend, and transact more safely.

“It is true that using stablecoin rails makes a lot of sense for some use cases, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use traditional rails for agentic flows,” Neville said. “There’s increasing warmth toward stablecoins, but there’s also a lot of interest in other rails.”

None of this means stablecoins have no role. It means their role is different than the one their evangelists advertised.

The explosion in AI-assisted software development is creating a new class of merchants that the traditional payments system was never designed to serve. A developer builds a tool that serves financial data via an application programming interface (API). Another developer’s agent calls it 40,000 times in a week at a fraction of a cent per request. There is no legal entity, no terms of service — and no way for a traditional payment processor to underwrite the risk. For these merchants, the choice may not be stablecoins or cards. It’s stablecoins or nothing.

And for the tasks where agents transact with other agents — scraping data, consuming API services, chaining together software workflows across borders — the economics of card payments genuinely break down. A fixed fee plus a percentage of the transaction often makes little sense when the payment is worth a tenth of a penny. Agentic workflows will also be global by default — an agent hitting an AI endpoint in the U.S., a data provider in Europe, and a compute cluster in Southeast Asia shouldn’t need three different payment rails. Stablecoins offer one, available everywhere, around the clock.

“With the volume that we see right now, most of the transactions are sub-10 cents,” said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of payments protocol x402. “So I can see a future where the rail that’s used fits the type of transaction a consumer wants to perform.” He believes consumers will use stablecoins for items costing less than $5 and a credit card for higher-value items. Currently, x402 is seeing an average of $8,000 and $60,000 in transaction volume a day, mostly in the USDC stablecoin, he said.

“I suspect the total number of transactions on crypto rails will be much higher, but the dollar value — maybe roughly equivalent vs. [traditional payment] rails,” Reppel said.

How autonomous the agents become may determine which rails win, said Cosmo Jiang, general partner at crypto investment firm Pantera Capital.

“The real differentiator is autonomous agents,” Jiang said. “Agents that have humans in the loop probably don’t need crypto.” Within a few years, he argues, humans will feel comfortable delegating tasks to software, and that software is more likely to pick stablecoins.

But the broader architecture taking shape — at least among the companies furthest along in building agent payments — looks different from what either side predicted. Agents paying with virtual cards on the front end, stablecoins settling on the back end. Card networks keeping their customer relationship and their fraud protections. Crypto getting its settlement volume and its role as the global plumbing underneath.

If that’s where agentic payments land — and no one yet knows for certain — the stablecoin industry will have found its killer app. Not by replacing the financial system, but by settling quietly behind it.